CALGARY — Led by teenage prodigy Penny Oleskiak, the Canadian swim team pulled off the shocker of the 2016 Summer Olympics by winning six medals when most prognosticators — including this one — predicted none.

Swimming Canada hopes to add to that total at the 2020 Tokyo Games with help from a new technology called Swimlytics.

Think Moneyball or advanced hockey stats, only for the pool.

“This is a game changer for Canada,” Anne Merklinger, Own The Podium’s chief executive officer, told reporters Thursday at a gathering of top sports scientists and researchers in Calgary. “We’re not going to tell you everything about it, because we want to protect our competitive advantage.”

Dave Abel / Postmedia Network

To use Swimlytics, athletes wear an accelerometer — which looks like a watch — on their wrists during training sessions. The device spits out a mountain of data including stroke length and turn speed.

With that information, swimmers can learn where they are losing valuable time to the thousandth of a second.

“If it can tell me when my stroke breaks down — when I become less efficient in the water — then I can work on improving that,” University of Calgary Dinos swimmer Peter Brothers said after trying out the device Thursday morning. “As you get faster, it’s harder to maintain the same stroke length and power. So if we use that technology to further improve that, it will be a big advantage.”

The federal government and the private sector invest a combined $2 million annually in the Innovations for Gold program — formerly known as Top Secret — to fund science and technology projects like Swimlytics.

“Swimlytics is what we call the system because it’s about swimmers, it’s about swimming and it’s data analytics,” said Dr. John Barden, a University of Regina assistant kinesiology professor who is the research lead on the project. “We’re taking data from the sensor, sending it to a server and we’re doing more processing, more analysis of that data outside the sensor itself.”

Jeff McIntosh / The Canadian PressJeff McIntosh /
The Canadian Press

The scientists and researchers behind such projects will never grace the top of the podium. They will never bask in the adulation of thousands of cheering fans in the stadium and millions watching via television or smartphone around the world.

But they hope their work might help an athlete jump from dreaded fourth or fifth place to gold, silver or bronze.

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Georgia Simmerling developed a detailed game play for 10 precious days off before the upcoming World Cup ski cross tour.

On the itinerary: family dinners, walks at the beach, yoga classes and many hours of sleep.

For while some of Canada’s medallists at the 2016 Rio Games are just easing back into the gym now, Simmerling jumped off her bike and snapped on her skis with no time to waste in chasing down the next goal.

The 27–year-old Vancouver native won cycling bronze in the team pursuit in Rio, and now she’s hot after an Olympic medal at the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

“I have my sights set on 2018,” she told Postmedia in a recent interview. “So if I wanted to race this season, I had to get right back on snow.”

Simmerling is the only Canadian to have competed at three separate Olympic Games in three different sports — alpine skiing in 2010, ski cross in 2014 and track cycling in 2016.

The day after winning bronze in Rio, Simmerling dutifully reported for a scheduled cardio and upper-body workout. A month later, she flew to Europe for a five-week training camp with the ski cross team.

After 20 months away from the mountain, she felt like a raw rookie — especially since she hadn’t raced ski cross since breaking her wrist in seven places at the 2015 world championships.

Track cycling looks terrifying to the uninitiated, with the steep banks, the fixed-gear bike with no brakes, and no way to stop pedalling at speeds reaching 57 km/hr. But Simmerling says ski cross — which features four athletes ripping down the mountain over bumps and jumps in a race to the finish line — is much more intimidating and hard on the body.

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AFP/Getty Images

“Cycling is kind to your joints,” she said. “People cycle when they’re injured for a reason. So it was definitely a shock to my joints, for sure, to go back to ski cross.”

Given the length of her hiatus, the coaching staff treated Simmerling like she was injured and gradually ramped up the intensity during the training camp.

“We checked off all the right boxes, and I progressed a lot quicker than I would have thought,” she said. “But I don’t think I’m as confident as I was racing in January 2015.”

In January 2015, Simmerling was ranked No. 2 in the world in ski cross. She plans to give herself time to get back to that level and hopefully peak in March at the 2017 world championships in Sierra Nevada, Spain.

But no pressure. Because perhaps the most important thing Simmerling gained from her cycling experience is a new perspective on winning and losing.

“Crossing the finish line with those girls was the best feelings of my life, for sure,” she said. “It felt great. It was a huge accomplishment for all of us.

“But in another way, it’s just another day. You’re still the same person when you wake up the next day.”